Google is latest weapon vs. GOP

How many clicks does it take to soil a candidate’s online reputation? A prominent liberal activist would like to find out.

Chris Bowers, campaign director for the Daily Kos, is launching a behind-the-scenes campaign against 98 House Republican candidates that attempts to capitalize on voters' Google search habits in the hopes of influencing midterm races.

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Bowers wants the Daily Kos’ thousands of participants to dig up little-noted or controversial news stories about the candidates that could hurt their chances with undecided voters. Users would click on the links and blog about the stories with the goal of boosting their rankings on search engines, so that undecided voters will discover them more easily.

He sees the campaign as a 21st century version of pamphleteering: Daily Kos readers are simply providing informational materials that are already out there in the same way that volunteers would hand out information to voters on the street.

The use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is standard practice for companies and campaigns managing their reputations online – or news organizations attempting to drive Internet traffic – but Bowers’ focus on promoting strategically damaging stories is unique.

Bowers says that he’s already received hundreds of e-mails with suggestions and maintains an online spreadsheet with key words like “Social Security,” “hypocrisy” and “Palin.” But so far, he’s only posted links to five stories related to five of the targeted candidates.

They include a Boston Globe story about a teenage strip search scandal involving former policeman Jeff Perry, a candidate in Massachusetts’ 10th District. Another item is a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed about abolishing public schools by Bay Area House nominee David Harmer.

Bowers also linked to a September POLITICO story about the flip-flopping stance of former Marine Sgt. Jesse Kelly, a conservative party tea party favorite running in Arizona. The story notes that Kelly said that he wanted to eliminate Social Security and Medicare in the run-up to the Republican primary, but subsequently said he would protect the two programs.

“We’re just educating people about how to get the message out without doing something more transgressive, for the lack of a better term,” Bowers said in an interview. “This is a more general education project on SEO, with the 2010 elections as a teaching moment.”

For his part, Bowers maintains this isn’t a repeat of his 2006 “Google Bomb” campaign because he’s not asking anyone to link candidates’ names to specific keywords such as “miserable failure.”

And he said that he has no plans to ask activists to flood Twitter and other social networks with links to the damaging stories during the final stretch before election day, unlike a January attack against Massachusetts Democrat Martha Coakley, who was the subject of an automated “Twitter Bomb” in the closing days of her failed Senate campaign.

Nine anonymous Twitter accounts sent out almost 1,000 negative messages about Coakley during the days up to the special election that Republican Scott Brown won. Wellesley University Professors Panagiotis Takis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj linked the accounts to a conservative Iowa group called The American Future Fund.

Naturally, Bowers’ effort is causing controversy among conservatives, search engine marketers and even Daily Kos readers about whether this kind of campaign constitutes an unfair manipulation of search engine results. It also could lead to reciprocal attacks.